A collection of interviews and portraits of 14 unique individuals describes the vastly different life experiences of people with two common elements: All are women, and all are Mormons.
"We wanted to dispel the stereotypes about Mormon women, held by some and reinforced by popular media," writes photographer Kent Miles, who spent years with friend and travel writer James N. Kimball searching out unique women and documenting their stories for "Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations" (2009 Handcart Books).
Individuals might find themselves in church each Sunday with any one of these women, but it would be inconceivable to imagine encountering all of them without the kind of extraordinary research and world travel it took to bring this collection together.
Kimball died in 2004 of a brain tumor before the book project was finished, and the recently released work is dedicated to him.
"Jim and I thought these women had stories everyone would benefit from hearing," said Miles, whose environmental portraiture illuminates the character of his subjects, compelling readers to look at the people, not just see their pictures.
"These are ordinary LDS women. And that is what this book celebrates," Miles writes in the book's preface.
But "ordinary" in this collection is further defined as "women notable for their own accomplishments, rather than who they were married to," or women of high position in the church, who "already had plenty of official visibility."
A few of the women profiled are known in Utah or elsewhere in Latter-day Saint circles, like Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice Christine Durham or Salt Lake poet and author Emma Lou Thayne.
Others are literally and figuratively strangers to mainstream Mormon culture. One example is Maria Consuelo Dimaya, who was a guerilla medic for communist rebels fighting the Marcos government in the Philippines before she and her husband investigated and joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
"I remember being overwhelmed by the matter-of-fact way Maria 'Chelito' Dimaya told of being captured and tortured by the Filipino military," the author writes. "She bore her testimony to me that the Mormon Church had more power to instigate social change than all the guns and all the revolutionaries in the world, because the gospel of Christ changed the hearts and desires of people."
Thayne talks about an upbringing in a Mormon culture "unused to sustaining two identities in any one woman."
"The idea of the radiant mother, which I have been a part of for nearly 40 years, is not something I would abandon," she says. "But a concomitant life beckoned, the life of those poets. It's one of the great human dilemmas: How could I live both lives and be fulfilled without sometimes neglecting one or the other? Mostly by being tired in the morning."
Also interviewed in the book are humanitarian Carol Gray of Sheffield, England; Salt Lake jewelry designer and business owner Angela Cummings; Auburn, Australia, city manager Lea Rosser; homemaker and mother of 12 Victoria Fong Kesler of Rifle, Colo.; history professor and Pulitzer Prize-winner Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Cambridge, Mass.; public health administrator Catherine M. Stokes of Salt Lake City; gulag survivor Tsobinar Tadevosyan of Yerevan, Armenia; mystery novelist Anne Perry of Ross-Shire, Scotland; news anchor for the deaf Kiyo Tanaka of Yokohama, Japan; fashion designer and humanitarian Cecile Pelous of Paris; and teacher and city council member Raquel Ribeiro of Santo Antonio do Pinhal, Brazil.
The book's foreword is by Utah's first and only female governor, Olene Walker. "The women in this book have made great achievements, but each one of them had to balance her professional life with the needs of her family and her church," Walker writes. "When we find that balance in our lives, when we work hard to look to our Heavenly Father for strength, I am convinced that we can achieve more than we ever dreamed possible."
Fewer than half of Kimball and Miles' interviews are published in "Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations," opening the possibility of an expanded or additional work in the future.